Remote Patient Monitoring Using Mobile and Cloud Computing

INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next paradigm shift, where sensors are connected to the Internet, which collect data for analysis to make our planet more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. A typical person carries on average one or two mobile devices nowadays. Hence, by leveraging the increasing presence of mobile devices the cost of equipment can be reduced significantly in many industries.

A. Motivation

The ECG iOS application presented in this paper focuses on the health care domain of IoT. With the advancements in embedded information and communication technologies, we can provide intensified healthcare support of senior citizens at homes and retirement homes. This type of technology would be helpful to be providing ECG monitoring facility to senior citizens, athletes and common people. By providing the facility to use these technologies in the home, citizens would be able to live independently for a longer period of time, helping to reduce costs of medical equipment Healthcare is currently facing the challenge of large amount of data that is unstructured, diverse and growing at an exponential rate. Data is constantly streamed through sensors, monitors and instruments in real time that is faster than the medical personnel can keep up with. The advanced techniques and high capacities of cloud computing, processing of a large amount of data can be performed more efficiently support big data analytics.

B. Problem statement

In the healthcare domain of IoT, patients will not have to make as many trips to the doctor anymore, since they can upload the collected data from the sensors to the cloud. This can be achieved for an ECG monitoring application on the mobile device, which will collect the bio-signal data using sensors and then upload to the cloud for keeping a record of the unstructured data. This will reduce the waiting time for the triage at the hospitals and minimize visits and reducing the cost of personnel and administrative operations. This convenience increases the quality of life for the patients as they can enjoy other activities instead of spending time commuting to the hospital/clinic and waiting in long triage queues.

C. Proposed solution

In addition to medical knowledge, various SSE Technologies are involved in IoT based healthcare applications, including microcontroller and sensor technologies, signal processing, communication protocols, system and software design (using well documented design patterns), DBMS, web services, data analysis, and cloud techniques. Such an infrastructure should not only satisfy the basic functional requirements, but also address some key non-functional quality requirements, such as Performance, privacy/security, portability, scalability, flexibility, and cost. Using the idea of IoT and cloud techniques, this paper presents a solution to use an ADC and microcontroller board, which obtains the bio-signal data from a person using sensors and sends it to the mobile device wirelessly using Bluetooth technology. When monitoring the ECG of the patient, the monitored data associated with the ECG waves being displayed on the mobile app is stored in the form of a binary file on the secure digital (SD) card of the device and the user has the ability to upload it to a structured query language (SQL) Server private database. With the proper hardware components like the ADC and microcontroller and the sensors, the solution can monitor the ECG of a person in any environment at low costs, without having to purchase any costly ECG monitoring devices.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATIO

A. Mobile-Based Healthcare Service:

Mobile devices are evolving at a rapid pace in the deployment of healthcare services. Our system is mainly based on real-time long-term health monitoring, catering to the demand of assisted living and health fitness information provider. Thus, the deployment of mobile devices into the mobile healthcare system focuses on several significant features for a medical healthcare system.

B. Communication between Mobile Device and Web Server:

Bluetooth data transmission is applied into the system because Bluetooth facilities are available in numerous smart devices, including portable tablet devices, laptops, personal computers, and even smart TVs. Conceptually; Bluetooth is a open wireless protocol operating in the 2.4-GHz band designed for a medium data rate that averages approximately 2 Mbps.

C. Web Server Cloud Healthcare Service:

Using a Web server healthcare cloud computing system, immediate access to the healthcare tracking system is possible anywhere. The ECG data are displayed in real time on the mobile device. To ensure a seamless and continuous health tracking system, a Web server cloud computing system is implemented into the healthcare service

A. System Architecture

The end-to-end system architecture for this IoT based project involves the hardware, the mobile a application and the cloud. The application has three sub layers named as follows:

Service layer, Platform Application layer and The File Transfer and Writing layer shows how the multiple layers in the system architecture interact with one another. The hardware layer contains the ADC, microcontroller and sensors, which collects the bio signal data and this data is transmitted by the Bluetooth channel on the microcontroller to the Application layer on an IOS device. The Application layer contains three sub layers within the layer itself. The Service Layer is the to op layer in the application layer, which interacts with the hardware layer. The ECG Service is present within the Service layer, which is responsible for retrieval of the bio signal data from the hardware layer and Storing the data in the buffer within ECG Model, which performs the writing of the data.

The data located in one central location rather than being distributed apart in different places provides higher feasibility and data security. Since, it is an ethical requirement to protect the critical medical data of individual’ bio signals, hence the centralized architectural design pattern was chosen for the ECG IOS app. In our architectural design, the data monitored for all the patients will be stored in one centralized location, which will be separated through a unique identifier to identify the data for different individuals Since all the data are stored in one place, it will be easy to query the database and perform data analysis out of the combined data. The following are some advantages and disadvantages of centralized architectural design pattern:

3) Advantages:

i. The data are easily placed in the server.

ii. There is an effective use of space for the storage of the data within the cloud.

iii. All the related data are kept together.

iv. Data redundancy is avoided.

v. It is a uniform service provided to all users.

vii. The data security is improved in comparison to decentralized system

5) Algorithm:

1. Start

2. Read electrical activities of the heart from human body using sensors.